Reading a dovetail drawer

Pull a drawer all the way out and turn it on its side. The corner joint will tell you more about the piece than the finish ever does, and it takes about four seconds to read once you know what you are looking at.

Hand-cut dovetails are uneven. The pins are narrow, often narrower than a pencil, and the spacing wanders a little because a person laid them out with a marking gauge and a bevel. You will usually see a faint scribe line running across the end grain where the gauge was set, and that line does not stop at the joint. It runs the full width of the board because the maker scored it in one pass.

Machine-cut dovetails from the late nineteenth century onward are the opposite. The pins and tails are the same width as each other, the spacing repeats exactly, and there is no scribe line at all. Neither is better. A drawer cut on a jig in 1958 can outlast a hand-cut one from 1890 if the wood was dry and the glue was good.

What the sides are made of

Drawer sides are the quiet indicator. Solid timber sides, usually a secondary species like poplar, birch or pine, mean the drawer was built as a box. Look at the bottom panel too: a thin solid panel that sits in a groove and is free to move is an older habit, while a plywood bottom stapled into a rebate is later work.

Mid-century case goods sit in the middle of that range. A great many of them use machine dovetails at the front, a simpler rebate at the back, and a plywood bottom. That combination is not a fault. It is what a factory did when it was building furniture to be sold at a price and used every day.

The parts that fail

Three things go wrong with an old drawer and all three are fixable at a kitchen table. The runners wear into a shallow trough, so the drawer drops and catches. The bottom panel works loose and rattles. And the joint at one front corner opens because someone pulled the drawer by one knob for thirty years.

The runner wears because timber rubs on timber. You can glue a thin strip of hardwood into the worn track, let it cure, and pare it back level with a chisel until the drawer runs again. The joint that has opened usually only needs the old glue cleaned out with warm water and a thin blade, then fresh glue and a clamp overnight. Neither repair changes how the piece looks, which is the point.